For most of the 1990s and 2000s, the Gallagher brothers clashed on stage and traded high-profile insults in newspaper interviews and on social media. So rumors of a Oasis reunion tour in 2025 has sparked furious speculation about how the two mended a rift that had seemed intractable for decades.
Family therapists told the Guardian that while sibling rifts are common and often repairable, reunions like the Gallaghers’ only succeed if both warring parties are ready to bury the hatchet.
Janet Reibstein, a family therapist, professor emeritus at Exeter University and author of Good Relations: Cracking the Code of How to Get On Better, said such reconciliation events can “become explosive” if both sides are not ready, and people have to enter them strive for a cooperative peacemaking process, not a battlefield.
“It’s usually not a one-step healing, but moving forward carefully,” she said, adding that reunions “can often be healing episodes in themselves, because people can have the experience of being in an anodic situation where you can’t have anger around and often you can see each other again”.
Reibstein said family breakups are common because family is the “cauldron of the most intense emotions,” with sibling relationships being especially “intense and problematic and rewarding.”
“The sibling has a dilemma, a sort of bipolar bit about it: you feel loyal and relate to each other, you’ve been through the same things, but at the same time you’re competing for the limited resources that any family has – physical space, food , but especially for the attention, admiration, care of the most important people for you, who are your parents,” she said.
She said transition points such as marriage or career achievements could be “potentially fragile times”, stressing “who was first, who gets what”.
Reibstein said that conflicts often take time to resolve, and the first step is to process and validate feelings of anger, which “is always some kind of defense against some sense of hurt or injustice”.
“The rifts cannot be healed until the pain is addressed,” she said, adding that once hurt feelings are validated, anger often dissipates as there is a sense that justice has been done.
Often it can take a third party to acknowledge the underlying issue, point out that there are other perspectives and encourage the person to reflect on the role they may have played in driving the conflict. “Anger is blinding, hurt is blinding, you can’t really see the other person’s side until you can get rid of those two things. That’s why it often takes someone outside to go ‘how about this perspective?’ – take off the blinders and you can see,” said Reibstein.
This is usually a therapist, but it can be a trusted friend or family member who can reflect on what may be happening on both sides, while also acknowledging and validating the feelings.
Reibstein said one misconception that fuels a lot of conflict is that people are intentionally trying to hurt. “Often it doesn’t start with malicious intent, it’s misunderstandings,” she said.
Dr Anu Sayal-Bennett, a consultant clinical psychologist at the London Child and Family Therapy Centre, said siblings can be “competitive, jealous and angry”, and this is often linked to childhoods where they are influenced by parental preference, and their approval or disapproval.
“There can be transgenerational patterns of communication characterized by alienation and distancing. Sometimes it is protective: a person may feel hurt and wounded and need to withdraw. They may not have the words to express their emotional pain,” she said.
As a result, some individuals may reconnect after a long separation as if nothing had happened in the meantime. Other relationships can play out as a “continuous cycle of reconnection and separation”.
She said family therapy can often provide an important space to work through difficult feelings. “Breakups and feeling stuck can be very painful. We must be compassionate and non-judgmental towards all who experience or have experienced family breakdown.”
